THE ACTORS REHEARSE THE STORY OF CHARLOTTE SALOMON | Shakespeare and Company's "Diva Series" continues with Penny Kreitzer in the story of the German artist — best known for the epic Life? Or Theater? — who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 only to be apprehended in Vichy in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz, where she was murdered, just 26 years old. Written by David Bridel, Kreitzer, and Jonathan Rest and directed by Rest, the work takes the form of a play within a play, as, back at the Jerusalem Festival in 1982, a group of actors (one of them Kreitzer) tries to present Salomon's story in the face of a differing version from her stepmother, Paula Lindberg. | Shakespeare & Company, Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, 70 Kemble St, Lenox | 413.637.3353 | June 3-14 | Curtain 7:30 pm Wed-Thurs | 3 pm Fri | 3 pm [June 7] or 8:30 pm [June 14] Sun | $16-$34; $11-$29 students, seniors; June 7 $34-$60

BEN'S TRUMPET | BalletRox and Wheelock Family Theatre team up to present BalletRox director Anthony Williams's take on the Caldecott Medal–winning children's book by Rachel Isadora in which a young boy in Harlem discovers hot jazz. The evening will also include presentations of Peter and the Wolf and La Favorita. | Wheelock Family Theatre, 200 the Riverway, Boston | 617.879.2000 | May 29–June 7 | Curtain 7:30 pm Fri | 1 + 7:30 pm Sat | 3 pm Sun | $20-$30

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR | Our Place Theatre Project's ninth annual African-American Theatre Festival continues with Lillian Hellman's 1934 play about a girl's boarding school and its two headmistresses. When one unhappy student runs away and is about to be sent back, she gets off the hook by declaring that the headmistresses are having a lesbian affair. Our Place artistic director Jacqui Parker is at the helm. | BCA Plaza Theatre, 539 Tremont St, Boston | 617.933.8600 | June 6-13 | Curtain 7:30 pm Wed-Thurs | 8 pm Sat | 3 pm Sun | $15-$35

Parallel worlds Playwright Karen Zacarias would seem to have taken long drafts of Tom Stoppard Elixir.

Review: Tír Na Theatre Company's Trad The fiddler’s on the ground floor in Trad , but Tevye would nonetheless identify with the play’s history-bound patriarch — though compared with this venerable coot, Sholem Aleichem’s beleaguered dairyman is a spring chicken.

Old haunts It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that Blithe Spirit , that cocktail shaker full of dry martini and ectoplasmic mayhem, will amuse. Playwright Noël Coward diagnosed his own gift as a talent to do just that.

Cool drink on a hot day Alan Ayckbourn has been often dismissed as the British Neil Simon. He's also been hailed as a playwright of such acute insight that, if you look beyond the laughs, he deserves to be mentioned in the same critical breath as Harold Pinter.

LIGHT WAVES: BOSTON BALLET'S ''ALL KYLIÁN'' | March 13, 2013 A dead tree hanging upside down overhead, with a spotlight slowly circling it. A piano on stilts on one side of the stage, an ice sculpture's worth of bubble wrap on the other.

HANDEL AND HAYDN'S PURCELL | February 04, 2013 Set, rather confusingly, in Mexico and Peru, the 1695 semi-opera The Indian Queen is as contorted in its plot as any real opera.

REVIEW: MAHLER ON THE COUCH | November 27, 2012 Mahler on the Couch , from the father-and-son directing team of Percy and Felix Adlon, offers some creative speculation, with flashbacks detailing the crisis points of the marriage and snatches from the anguished first movement of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony.